I’ve recently seen some photos of some Last-Gen Mainline freight engines, Specifically the E-33/EL-C/EF4, and I’ve noticed that they will usually only have one pantograph up for multiple engines, How do they do this?
If I remember correctly the E-33s had a bus between long hood ends that could take a jumper so only one pan needed to be up. This may be related to the experiment Virginian did using locomotive 230 as a road slug.
To my knowledge none of the flavors of E-44 had that arrangement.
In this photo you can make out the ‘jumper cables’ on the long hoods of these Virginian EL-Cs:
Virginian GE E-33 241 by Craig Garver, on Flickr
I don’t recall if it was the Great Northern that initiated these ‘jumpers’ but the ‘wire’ side of the circuit could be shared between ‘motors’ with contact points between the units.
GN by Mike Keyes, on Flickr
I believe the Reading electric multiple unit cars had a similar arrangement. See the contact above the headlight:
Reading 852, Philadelphia in September 1964 by Marty Bernard, on Flickr
Good Luck, Ed
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If you look closely at the coupling of the two engines above, you can see the big insulators for the 11,000 volt bus. The cable itself is in a “U-shape”, not as noticeable.
There was at least one pair of these that had a unit with no pantograph at all – just
“the bus” connecting it to the other unit.
I remember when the EF-4’s first arrived in New Haven. I was about 13 and took the train from South Norwalk to New Haven on a Sunday, then wandered over to the shops to look at them. Back in those days, I don’t think anyone saw me and no one said anything.